The Armed Maiden and White Femininity
As a Neoclassical sculpture, it is no surprise that Nation as Sovereign and Power employs Roman symbols of statehood and Greek allegorical figures to make known its purpose. However, these conventionalized symbols of power are not simple, but rather are a culmination of centuries of elaborating upon and changing preexisting symbols that date back to the Roman Empire. This section will focus on Justice, her sword, and white femininity.
Justice is often identified by carrying a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. This imagery has been popularized over centuries and civilizations, with its roots tracing back to Justica in Ancient Roman mythology. [7] With many democratic republics such as the United States or England tracing their political heritage back to Rome, judicial institutions such as the Supreme Court often populate their buildings with Justice’s figure, emphasizing her relationship to judgment and the exacting of fair punitive justice. Justice as the administrator of punishment is central to understanding her as a symbol; she is considered the “political” Virtue of her sisters, and any act by Justice, even capital punishment, is considered “ipso facto righteous.” [8]
[Photograph: Justice and her Sword form the Supreme Court Pediment]
It is through her sword that she is able to administer punishment for crimes against the state and virtue. As Marina Warner writes in Monuments and Maidens, her sword “represents the ability of humanity to judge between one thing and another, to part right from wrong,” in the pursuit of justice. When installed in front of courthouses or sentencing rooms, she implies that the institution of the law is able to accomplish as such. [9] This implicitly instructs the viewer not to question the authority of the criminal justice system, an order that may have fatal consequences. When one considers that Black Americans are “seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes,” such as murder or sexual assault, and spend more time on average for the same crimes in comparison to their white counterparts, believing blindly in the American ideal of Justice and her judicial system makes someone complicit in a broken system. [10] I find it fitting, then, that our Justice’s vision lacks a blindfold that other depictions of her privilege, her steely gaze a core aspect of her function as the watchful guardian of the building. At this court house, Justice cannot hide from accusations of racial discrimination from behind a blindfold.
As such, it may be easiest to read this monument as a depiction of white Justice as opposed to American Justice. Her whiteness is central to her, and by extension Nation’s, depiction of powerful femininity as what Warner dubs “armed maidens.” Depictions of combat, she asserts, have historically been used to indicate an “internal spiritual struggle,” that is found in the dualism of the armed maiden, who maintains her feminine fragility and weakness while also holding a virginal “goodness” that allows her to triumph over evil [11]. It is the suppression of women’s sexuality that enables them to rise “above suspicion, especially sexual” and retain the ability to make fair and rational decisions about other’s fate. [12]